When I last wrote to this blog, it was with the elation that F was here.
That was over a year and a half ago. F is now 20 months old. She is everything wonderful and being a Mommy is everything wonderful!
Which is good because…here we go again!
Let me start at the beginning…
F was such an awesomely easy baby. She only cried when she was hungry. I was able to nurse her exclusively for the first 4 1/2 months; at that point she began getting really interested in food. We started her with mashed veggies. Potatoes, carrots, peas…then some fruits- apples, bananas, berries, and continued veggies- broccoli and cauliflower…she loved her foods.
She turned 1, and I was still able to nurse her, so I kept going. We started to introduce cow’s milk at 13 months, and she would have my milk in the morning and before bed with cow’s milk at lunch. Other times of the day, she had water or very lightly tinged with juice water. At 14 months, she started rejecting the morning nursing, preferring instead to be mobile with her cup. I provided her with some of my freezer stash and then pumped for the first morning, using that morning’s pump for the next day. This was a sign that she was also almost ready to ween off of breast milk, even if I wasn’t quite ready for her to yet. I mixed some cow’s milk with the pump to give her a slurry, then cow’s milk with lunch. She was still good with our nursing and cuddling at night.
Then it came time for me to go back to work. Since she was over a year old, I had no legal leg to stand on to pump and keep up my supply…plus she was doing a self-weening process. In the beginning of September, I stopped nursing and pumping. It took about 10 days for my supply, which was becoming backed up, but luckily never infected, to go back down to normal boobs. It was another two months with slurries of breast and cow’s milk to go through my freezer stash. (I worked really hard to get a very nice stash!)
Around this time, I also started using an ovulation kit (OPK). Not as a means to get pregnant, but rather as a means to see if we needed to use birth control. I was on hormonal birth control in the last year of high school through my first year teaching and I was not a fan. I would rather use barrier methods, and Hubby was ok with that. But maybe we didn’t have to continue. We were both very happy with F and we swore up and down we didn’t need to have any more, that our family was complete. Heck, we weren’t sure we wanted any more. We certainly we against treatment for another one.
So, to confirm my continued anovulatory status, OPKs (and a treat every night, two cookies or a scoop of ice cream…)
I started getting my period very regularly in January, which doctors said I was likely ovulating as well.
August was negative.
September was negative.
October was positive on the 30th, meaning I ovulated on the 31st.
November was negative.
I was thinking October was a fluke. Or, at the very least, that we could try the rhythm method and just avoid direct contact at the end of the month, when I was likely to ovulate.
Right around Yule (December 21), I told Hubby I wanted to love him like his 30 year old wife, not his high school girlfriend. In the heat of the moment, he, the logical one, agreed. Two more passionate nights followed closely there after.
I kept using the OPKs and I kept getting negative results until 12/30. Meaning I ovulated on 12/31.
But it had been at least six days since our moments of passion. And sperm only live for a short period of time.
Then I started spotting. I always spot before my period.
But my period never came.
I went to Target one Friday over lunch and got a pregnancy test. I had butterflies of both excitement and nerves. By the time the test area was wet, it was positive. I wasn’t maybe pregnant, I was very pregnant.
I then went to Babies R Us and got a “Big Sister” shirt for F to wear for when Daddy came home.
He read her shirt and a huge smile came over his face, and a wave of relief washed over me. He was happy and excited. He was going to be Daddy again and that’s a good thing and he thinks it’s a good thing too. His talk of we only need one and we’re only ever going to have one was more for me than it was for him. He didn’t want me to do treatment again either, and he didn’t want to say he wanted another kid when his wife may not be able to make it happen.
But his smile said it all.
It still amazes me how we had to try so hard for F, but then we didn’t try at all for 2.0. Yes, we technically stopped not trying. We pulled the goalie for selfish reasons. But the point wasn’t to get pregnant. We are over the moon, though, that another wonderment is going to join our little clan.
Today is March 5th and I am 11W1D. In honor of not spilling the beans until we are ready to announce it to the world, this post will be saved until after we announce to friends and family. All posts that I feel I need to write, as this blog is more of a journal for me than anything else, will all be posted on the same day with just a few hours between them (to keep chronological order).
Beyond The "I" Word 